Purpose -The purpose of this article is to examine how the labour process of further education lecturers has changed as a result of legislative reforms introduced in the early 1990s. Design/methodology/approach -The paper draws on labour process theory and emergent perspectives on "the new public management" to provide theoretical frameworks. Evidence is derived from research carried out at three FE colleges in the English West Midlands involving interviews with managers and lecturing staff, documentary material and a survey of lecturing staff employed in the colleges. Findings -Market-based reforms in this sector have resulted in the intensification and extensification of work effort for lecturers. This paper argues that these changes have been driven by the ideological underpinning of the reform process. Individual and collective acts of lecturer resistance have been insufficiently strong to prevent change from occurring and worker alienation has increased.Research limitations/implications -The case study method renders generalisability of findings difficult. Comparative studies in other localities and sectors are needed. Practical implications -The research indicates that the "new managerialism" -which has developed in the public sector -has created an increasingly alienated workforce and that the processes of change in many institutions have had negative outcomes. Originality/value -The research demonstrates and application of labour process theory, supported by empirical evidence, as a means for examining the changing experiences of a group of public sector workers and assessing the effect of the "new managerialism" on workers' experiences.

This article examines the moderating effect of collective trust in management on the relation between job insecurity (both objective and subjective) and employee outcomes (work-related anxiety and organisational commitment). This is contextualized in the modern British workplace which has seen increased employment insecurity and widespread cynicism. We use matched employer-employee data extracted from the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) 2011, which includes over 16,000 employees from more than 1,100 organizations. The multilevel analyses confirm that objective job insecurity (loss of important elements of a job such as cuts in pay, overtime, training, and working hours) are significantly correlated with high levels of work-related anxiety and lower levels of organizational commitment. These correlations are partially mediated by subjective job insecurity (perception of possible job loss). More importantly, collective trust in management (a consensus of management being reliable, honest and fair) significantly attenuates the negative impact of objective job insecurity on organizational commitment, and reduces the impact of subjective job insecurity on work-related anxiety. Theoretical and practical implications and limitations of these effects are discussed.

This document is the submitted version of the journal article, as originally submitted to the journal prior to the peer-review process. There may be some differences between the published version and this version and you are advised to consult the published version if you wish to cite from it.

Education management has increasingly been dominated by the norms and requirements of general management ideologies that focus on performance controls and target achievements. Under this regime, solving the labour problem -relatively low productivity -has taken precedence over all other forms of management. In pursuit of this objective senior managers have employed more and more Taylor-like initiatives, including close supervision of task content and its execution. As a result the professionals have resisted collectively and formally through unions, informally in the common rooms and individually through grievance, absenteeism, increased instrumentalism and dull compliance in the job. The application of tighter controls over performance turns these workers into waged labour, displacing any notions of professional self-regulation and undermining collegial high trust relations and educational autonomy that these professionals might reasonably expect.

This article examines the moderating effect of collective trust in management on the relation between job insecurity (both objective and subjective) and employee outcomes (work-related anxiety and organisational commitment). This is contextualized in the modern British workplace which has seen increased employment insecurity and widespread cynicism. We use matched employer-employee data extracted from the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) 2011, which includes over 16,000 employees from more than 1,100 organizations. The multilevel analyses confirm that objective job insecurity (loss of important elements of a job such as cuts in pay, overtime, training, and working hours) are significantly correlated with high levels of work-related anxiety and lower levels of organizational commitment. These correlations are partially mediated by subjective job insecurity (perception of possible job loss). More importantly, collective trust in management (a consensus of management being reliable, honest and fair) significantly attenuates the negative impact of objective job insecurity on organizational commitment, and reduces the impact of subjective job insecurity on work-related anxiety. Theoretical and practical implications and limitations of these effects are discussed.